Previously, electrical connectors designed for connection to a printed circuit board employed electrical contacts having tail portions which extend through the housing of the connector. The tail portions of such contacts are designed to be inserted into plated through-holes in the printed circuit board. However, use of printed circuit boards having plated through-holes to accommodate the tails of the contacts are expensive to manufacture as the entire through-hole must be plated with a conductive material. Additionally, modem reflow solder techniques are not effective for soldering through-hole components, thus requiring an additional manufacturing step for standard connectors such as hand soldering or wave soldering.
Connectors which are adapted for surface-mounting on a printed circuit board are generally known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,682,829 to Kunkle et al. discloses a surface mount socket including a plurality of terminals arranged for receiving dual in-line packaged components.
Other United States patents which disclose various structures for surface-mount connectors include: U.S. Pat. No. 4,955,820 to Yamada et al. which is directed to a T-leg SMT contact; U.S. Pat. No. 5,277,597 to Masami et al. which is directed to a thin, applied-to-surface type electric connector; U.S. Pat. No. 5,451,174 to Bogursky et al. directed to surface mounted pins for printed circuit boards; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,535,513 to Frantz which is directed to a method for making surface mount connectors.
The connectors described above are generally directed to accommodating another connector structure and do not permit the easy accommodation of individual wires for electrical connection to the printed circuit board.